Unlike so many contenders, including the Miami Marlin team they beat Thursday night, the Mets had known the gist of their trade deadline plans for weeks. They had been sellers for as long as almost anyone, with plenty of time to evaluate exactly what they might want in exchange for the many players they made clear they’d be willing to trade.
But with less than 72 hours remaining until the deadline, they had not traded any of them — in large part because no one else was trading anyone yet, either. A few minutes after A.J. Minter tossed his towel in the laundry bin and left the Mets’ clubhouse in street clothes late Thursday night, though, he became the first domino to tumble.
The Mets traded Minter to the Minnesota Twins for minor league infielders Billy Amick and Bruin Agbayani — son of Benny — in a ceremonious start to what should be a busy few days.
Despite knowing his team’s fate for weeks, and a stated willingness to make deals earlier, the market offered no reason for Stearns to hurry. The only deals that preceded Minter’s were the Angels’ surprising trade of catcher Logan O’Hoppe and Chase Silseth to the Rangers and the Tigers’ less surprising trade of catcher Jake Rogers to the Orioles.
The relief market, like the market at large, should start to move now.
Whether the Mets’ deadline pace accelerates will likely depend on how willing they are to budge on their early standards for returns: Multiple members of contending front offices said the Mets have established noticeably high asking prices for their pitchers, particularly Freddy Peralta.
Selling teams often set prices high early and move them to fit the market as the deadline nears. Buying teams accusing those sellers of asking for the world is effectively a trade deadline tradition — so in some ways, everyone is running the usual plays.
As of Friday morning, members of the Mets and front offices in touch with them believed the Mets will eventually trade all their other players on expiring contracts — Peralta, Clay Holmes, Brooks Raley, and Tyrone Taylor. Of their players still under contract beyond this year, Luke Weaver seemed the likeliest to go. No one asked expected a deal to include Francisco Lindor.
Scouts from the White Sox, Padres, and others spent Thursday evening at Citi Field. Those teams have starting pitching needs, though the man who started for the Mets Thursday night, Nolan McLean, is one of the few players they have said is not for sale.
Peralta is scheduled to start here Friday night, and manager Andy Green said the Mets still plan for him to do so. While starting him could risk injury, or waste bullets he might prefer to save for his next team, a person familiar with the right-hander’s thinking said he is preparing to pitch Friday, in accordance with the Mets’ plans.
But the chances of Peralta actually taking the mound for the Mets then are not exactly 100 percent: A trade could materialize before then, and if it doesn’t, the Mets could still decide to hold him out to avoid injury or out of respect for suitors who would rather he make as many starts for them as possible.
Clay Holmes is in a similar situation, having navigated a successful rehab outing earlier this week that left the veteran feeling ready to make his next outing in the majors. He will throw a bullpen Friday afternoon, at which point Green said the Mets will have more clarity about if or when they use Holmes next.
Holmes would be on turn to return from the injured list and start for the Mets Sunday if he is not traded by then, though because he will likely draw an even wider market and larger return than Peralta, the Mets have little incentive to risk injury by starting him before a deal materializes.
As for what the Mets are hunting in exchange, Stearns has said publicly that they must be open-minded to the best talent available, whatever that is. Agbayani and Amick have different offensive profiles. MLB Pipeline ranked both among the Twins’ top 30 prospects, Amick 21st and Agbayani 29th.
“I don’t think it makes sense for us to zoom in on a particular skill set or a particular player profile and say, that’s the type of player we need to acquire,” Stearns said in his meeting with the media earlier this homestand.
“We see all over the big leagues that there are players who can impact winning in very different ways, and we have to recognize that in our evaluation of whatever deals may or may not be in front of us. We see different types of prospects traded in different deadlines. It’s very difficult to predict exactly the type of player that’s going to be traded, the type of player that’s going to be available at a deadline.”
That Stearns pointed to “prospects” in that answer might offer more specific insight. Multiple Mets decision makers have suggested their focus will be on acquiring the best prospects they can in these deals — as tried to in the Minter deal — rather than the kind of big-leaguer-for-big-leaguer deals that similarly situated teams sometimes make to get a head start on their offseason priorities. But they also alluded to the need to be “creative,” which might be a relative term in the context of Stearns’s reputation for dealmaking discipline.
The Minter deal qualified as a classic deadline swap. The Mets should have plenty more of those to come.
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